Limits to Liberation after Apartheid: citizenship, governance and culture (review)

This collection deals with a range of challenges confronting the South African state. Described as ‘limits to liberation’ the manifestations of inequality and marginalization, from the global to the local, are explored through a range of topical case studies. The text is broken down into the three main sections: culture and the limits to liberation; rethinking citizenship and governance in urban South Africa; and cultural plurality and cultural politics after apartheid. This is a mixed collection, and Robins’s introductory chapter entwines the political, economic and cultural threads that run through the text.

Von Lieres’s opening chapter considers marginalization and citizenship through a lens of competing conceptions of ‘rights’. This is an abstract discussion, and the theoretical arguments are not grounded in the South African experience. Continuing the exploration of differing contextual constructs, the Comaroffs provide a fascinating paper discussing the challenges of customary and national law. Utilizing a legal case they highlight emergent tensions as attempts to balance cultures and rights have resulted in a fetishism of the law as a neutral medium in a politicized environment. In another pertinent chapter, Pillay explores re-narrations of the contentious question of Afrikaner identity, showing a shift from race to discourses of minority rights expressed through language and ethnicity. Koelble and LiPuma then attempt to link the re-emergence of traditional leaders to global capital circulations. Primarily focused upon capital flows, their study forgoes the possibility of an examination of traditional leaders in contemporary South Africa, as they are mentioned only briefly at the start and end of the chapter.

Shearing and Wood then shift the focus, arguing that disparities in wealth and power are embedded within shifts to nodal governance, the communalization of space and a shift from citizens to denizens. The challenges of nodal governance also feature in Pieterse’s chapter which critically evaluates city development planning in Cape Town. Considering the challenges of the informal to development planning, Pieterse suggests that the inclusivity sought by the planners needs to be based upon an engagement with the driving forces of the informal, and a recognition that elements of the informal operate invisibly.

In one of a number of chapters drawing upon the group area of Mannenberg in Cape Town, Chipkin ties the assumptions and values of development planning to their (re)definitions at the community level, framed by historical and contemporary constraints. Chapters by Salo and by Jacobs and Krabill also explore local interpretations of the moral economy and consider the mediated space of Mannenberg: Jacobs and Krabill through an analysis of media coverage, and Salo in an ethnographic study of gender and culture. Salo’s insightful chapter examines re-inscriptions of global culture in the local context, and how gender(ed) power relations are crucial in understanding these.

Continuing the cultural consideration, Spiegel’s chapter begins with a challenge to the belief that urban citizenship is intertwined with material consumption. Attempting to ‘show the elusiveness of urban citizenship as a concept’ (p. 191), Spiegel endeavours to explore the development of the term spaza and relate the numerous uses of this to the ‘elusive’ urban citizenship. Unfortunately this chapter feels out of place and whilst the focus upon etymology provides a useful tool of engagement with linguistics and history, the link to urban citizenship after apartheid was unconvincing to this reviewer. Continuing the consideration of multiple interpretations and contradictions, Jackson challenges instrumentalist approaches to ‘coloured’ identity as simplistic, seeking to emphasize instead the ambiguities and pluralities of ‘coloured’ identity. Whilst there is a useful discussion of the links between emancipation and Englishness, the chapter is disjointed and suffers from the author’s failure to name or contextualize his informants.

The final chapter provides a postmodern reading of recent urban development in Cape Town, and the limiting impact of communal/collective space on the involvement of the poor. Addressing many of the issues...